A Song Of Ice And Fire

Folks, I've got an obvious question: has anyone tried writing fanfics of other fantasy stories In the Style of A Song Of Ice And Fire? I'd be especially interested in a version of The Lord Of The Rigns, with its setting that, though mired in sorrow and loss, is extremely sentimental and high-minded, as opposed to The Known World's callous and self-aware brutality and, er, worldliness.

Thought people might enjoy this.

Sorry GRRM but Tolkien won that

JRR was straight savage in that. Tolkien by several country miles.

Sure, sure.

About that fic...?

I've debated writing something like that (focusing around Oldtown and its vassals breaking away from the Reach) but I haven't.

I find GRRM's style fun to write, but I've never really stuck with it long enough to do a whole fanfic. I'm trying to write some of the Age of Heroes stories as if they were in-universe fairytales, but the only one I've finished is Garth Greenhands. Lann the Clever winning Casterly Rock is driving me crazy though... Guile Heroes are hard.

edited 5th May '16 12:49:32 PM by johnnye

Martin's prose style is bland and uninteresting; why would someone want to write other fantasy stories "in the style of ASOIAF"? The reason "in the style of Tolkien" exists is because Tolkien's writing style is exceptional, so reading him spend several paragraphs describing the scenery remains engaging.

Martin's talents are in his multidimensional characters, not in the writing style itself.

Dialogue, character development and plotting is GRRM's true gift.

He's juggling 30 different plots and he doesn't have any glaring plot holes to show for it.

@Galadriel I like his prose. It's not too descriptive and it never gets in the way of the story unless he starts going on about food.

Tolkien's prose is no doubt amazing. It feels like I'm reading poetry sometimes and almost ethereal but it's also a slog to read through. I just want to hear the characters interact already.

And sometimes, you know, I just don't care about the history of that mountaintop over there.

edited 5th May '16 1:11:44 PM by MadSkillz

That's what featurettes, footnotes, and appendices are for.

I meant narrative style, not prose style. Indeed GRR's prose doesn't draw much attention to itself; some would consider it a virtue, others a vice.

Indeed GRR wins at characterization, plotting, and wordlbuilding. Which make for a better story, but perhaps not for a better text, IYKWIM.

In a GGR-syle Middle Earth, the darker consequences of Hobbit petty bourgeois mindset would be cast in a harsher light. The Rangers would be expanded upon as an institution, complete with hierarchical squabbles. When describing Gondor et al., the narration would not stop at "things used to be nice, but people got lazy, stuff stagnated, and Sauron took us all by surprise". Instead, we would get to find out that the Stewards' rule is not uncontested, that not all elves are "conservative" and that those that are have different opinions on what should be conserved and how. The Witch King of Angmar would have a self-righteous backstory he tells himself about how he ended up like he is. We would go into more detail regarding the horseback culture of Rohan and how social status functions there. Matters of money and debt and gold would crop up everywhere, in more complicated ways than "five armies were all after one huge stash of gold".

I dunno, something like that.

edited 5th May '16 1:36:02 PM by TheHandle

There's a lot of good potential

We'd see the Prince of Ithilien being more expanded on.

I like the idea of Third Age Sauron being a very Stannis-like figure except substitute Justice for Order.

We'd also get expansions on all the Nazgul.

Witch-King could've previously been some tragic figure in the past.

There might even be some good orcs and more insight to their culture.

I'm guessing they'd be like the Greyjoys, the Cleganes the Boltons, and the Dothraki, combined?

edited 5th May '16 1:53:38 PM by TheHandle

I think the orcs would be more like Clegane's followers.

But maybe every so often we'd get an orc called Pigug the Reader

They would call confetti the "reader's digest".

You are serious about this aren't you? Well I could do some reading as well as some research.

Well, I'm serious in my interest for reading that. My writing days are far behind me. So are my proofreading days, for that matter!

I suppose so. I too would like to see a similar fic as well as the other way around. What would happen if ASOIAF was a bit less realpolitik and more like Tolkien? I cannot do this myself but I would like to see it.

I don't think you can really make ASOIAF "more Tolkien" without making it, well, not ASOIAF. It'd place a lot more emphasis on the White Walker threat and the various gods, as well as individual heroism. Less moral greyness, more epic in the original sense of the word.

I did actually once try to write a LOTR fanfic but I stopped pretty quick because I couldn't measure up to Tolkein's writing in my own opinion.

Just soak yourself in the King James' bible for a while before beginning to write. The style should come naturally. That was Tolkien's main inspiration.

Reading the Weirwood Leviathan essays — I'd never caught this detail before, but Bloodraven and Bittersteel's mothers were a Blackwood and a Bracken respectively. Nice.

edited 7th May '16 8:22:45 AM by johnnye

An essay series I read noted that the Blackfyre Rebellions are essentially all of Westeros getting subsumed in the Riverlands feud.

Ha ha. What scamps.

On the subject of "ostensibly minor local squabbles with huge consequences", has anyone read any good analyses of the Defiance of Duskendale?

Always seemed really fucking weird to me, a lord in the Crownlands taking the king hostage over a tax disagreement. And then sticking to his guns when he's predictably besieged. Who benefits from Aerys being taken hostage but not being killed*? And how on earth did they talk the Darklyns into pulling such a suicidal stunt?

Apparently there's a story his Myrish wife talked him into it, that doesn't really make sense either.

* Unless something else was being negotiated with Rhaegar in the meantime?

edited 7th May '16 10:53:29 AM by johnnye

Something that bugs me about the vision of Westeros history that emerges from all these grand conspiracies: They increasingly paint a picture that the trueborn Targs weren't as bad as they've been painted, and that the real troublemakers were the Blackfyres and the anti-royalists.

In other words, the pureblooded silver-haired purple-eyed beautiful kings really are the good guys, and the bastard usurpers and social reformers really are the bad guys. Seems like a pretty big Double Subversion of two of the series big Genre Deconstruction tropes.

I mean, I get it if the series really is going for a grand Reconstruction of why a strong central monarchy really might be the best thing for such a society, as per the Leviathan comparison, but you'd thing an important part of reconstructing that trope would be acknowledging that actual blood-purity isn't as important as the appearance of stable continuity. But (1) that points to fake-Targ Aegon getting the throne over secret-Targ Jon (not necessarily a problem, just interesting), and (2) the "blood of the dragon", if it's a real thing, undercuts that moral by creating a real reason for royal blood-purity to matter.